On Thu, 2012-02-16 at 03:58 +0000, Ben Hutchings wrote: > > Well, in addition, there are SR-IOV network adapters that don't have any > bridge. For these, the software bridge is necessary to handle > multicast, broadcast and forwarding between local ports, not only to do > learning. For the scenario where there is no h/w bridge - the s/ware bridge should be usable. There's no way working around that. My contention is only with the case where there is a h/w bridge and there being two FDB tables; one in hardware and another in s/w. And both the h/w and s/w bridges doing flooding and learning. It is desirable to have options to use one or other or both with some synchronization. > Solarflare's implementation of accelerated guest networking (which > Shradha and I are gradually sending upstream) builds on libvirt's > existing support for software bridges and assigns VFs to guests as a > means to offload some of the forwarding. > If and when we implement a hardware bridge, we would probably still want > to keep the software bridge as a fallback. If a guest is dependent on a > VF that's connected to a hardware bridge, it becomes impossible or at > least very disruptive to migrate it to another host that doesn't have a > compatible VF available. In the scheme i described to John in last email, libvirt needs not be aware of existence of hardware offloading (and migration should be transparent of whether h/w bridge exists or not)... cheers, jamal -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe kvm" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
